Name the festival at which the following event took place. Cult American musician Ian Svenonius stands on an 18th-century military tower a mile from the shore, his gravity-defying hair whipping around in the breeze. He begins an impromptu play, with three randomly selected audience members improvising a rap behind him. Svenonius is talking as fast as he can in order to finish before the tide rushes in and we all get stranded in the English Channel overnight. Latitude? The Brighton biennial? A Comintern club night? None of the above.

If you answered the Branchage film festival, however, you'd be bang on. Svenonius's deadpan performance of "post-apocalyptic cinema" is part of an energetically loopy and welcoming event – now in its third year – that specialises in upending traditional notions of how people watch films. As well as the Svenonius event, Branchage this year put on a drive-in show of Superman projected on to the side of a dam, screened a documentary about bee colony collapse in an agricultural polytunnel (followed by a heated debate among farmers about pesticide use), and on a brisk Sunday night in October succeeded in drawing 400 hot-chocolate-drinking Jerseyites and visitors to the harbour to watch French electro act Zombie Zombie play a live accompaniment to Battleship Potemkin on the deck of the Duke of Normandy tugboat.

Branchage is typical of a new breed of film festival mushrooming across the UK. Cheap, friendly and emphasising the community and performance side of the festival experience, these upstarts – which include Flatpack in Birmingham, London's onedotzero, and Abandon Normal Devices (AND) in Manchester and Liverpool – have had phenomenal success despite their relative youth. Depending on who you ask, they are a reaction to the isolation of the digital world, a cheap local night out, a cousin to pop-up events such as Secret Cinema or the Cineroleum, or simply a snub to the elite industry fests such as London and Cannes. "The more established film festivals can be heartless," says Branchage founder Xanthe Hamilton, as we drive around Jersey's dark country lanes. "I would like to think at Branchage you have the same chance of getting into any given event as someone from the film industry." Branchage is about bringing people together, she says, as well as attracting new audiences to film events that wouldn't normally come. "Last year we had a British Sea Power event where half the audience was fishermen." The people who stood in the open air to watch Potemkin, she says, generated a real sense of community – one you can't get on YouTube.

Indeed, as if to underline her point, Hamilton spent that evening not pressing VIP flesh in a tent but popping between events in her Volvo. At the Superman drive-in, we discover that the makeshift projection screen, made from white tarpaulins tied together, has stuck halfway up the dam. Hamilton makes sure nobody was up on the sheer dam face in the dark. "We've had health and safety training," she says quietly.

The same hands-on approach was evident at Birmingham's Flatpack festival, back in March. Flatpack shares Branchage's community ethos, says its director Ian Francis. "I've been to plenty of festivals where customer experience was a pretty low priority – getting held in an enclosure while people with the right-coloured pass decide whether they can be bothered to see the film or not. We definitely wanted to create an antidote to that kind of event." With screenings of Victorian "magic lantern" shows, live film scores and a Plasticine competition, Flatpack is also "a reaction against the digital bubbles we build for ourselves," Francis says. "A live film event is subject to so many variables beyond the film itself – venue, audience, weather, performers, etc – that you never quite know what you're going to get. That's why these experiences make their mark, in a way that downloading something and watching it on a laptop never will."

Unlike the big events – Cannes, Toronto, Sundance – this new type of film festival is not focused on industry. You won't see film distributors doing deals in hotel lounges. Most of the screenings are of indie films with local relevance, classics the organisers happen to like, or commissioned collaborations with musicians and artists. Straight premieres, such as Gillian Wearing's Self-Made, which headlined the Saturday night slot at Abandon Normal Devices in Manchester three weeks ago, are outnumbered by events such as the one that followed immediately: wisecracking drag queen Peaches Christ presenting the schlock-horror-homage All About Evil.

The lack of genuflection to the film industry can, of course, be an achilles heel. Without the big studios and distributors and stars providing an commercial safety net, and with UK arts cuts looming, do Branchage and the rest have an economic raison d'etre? Or do they have a touch of wishful thinking about them – or even of the vanity project? "I've heard one of our more established counterparts describe these events as 'novelty film festivals'," says Francis. "But a bit of novelty might not be such a bad thing for the film festival sector." All festivals will feel the pain, he admits, "and some won't survive". Flatpack is in the last year of its grant from the Film Council, an organisation the government has disbanded without yet announcing a replacement. "Private sponsorship, box office, advertising and bar takings all help to make these things happen, but very rarely without some kind of public subsidy in the mix. A straightforward film festival is already expensive enough to put on before you throw in non-traditional venues, live acts, installations and so on. However, I think if you're offering something distinctive and people are excited about what you do, then you're more likely to flourish."

So rather than suffer for it, the theory is that eclecticism may allow this kind of festival to survive the dark days ahead. "If we were set up like a traditional film festival, we'd be struggling," says Dave Moutray, co-director of AND. "A lot of the films we show, people could very easily get at home." The two-year-old AND (publicly funded through 2012 via the legacy trust component of the Cultural Olympiad) is therefore forced to be creative about getting people out. Indeed, of all its peers, AND perhaps least resembles a traditional film festival: over two days in Manchester, I was shrinkwrapped by artist Lawrence Malstaf, blasted into space on Nelly Ben's simulation of the Soyuz rocket, and sipped whisky made from the sugar-rich urine of designer James Gilpin's diabetic grandmother. I saw only three feature films.

"Cinema is an important reference point for audiences," Moutray says. "They understand cinema, they know what the experience entails. But at the same time, we want to build an ideas bridge between cinema and contemporary visual arts. The contrast of the work [on AND's programme] provides multiple gateways for audiences that might not otherwise know about us. So long as they get their toe in the water, we're happy."

Moutray is a big man who carries around a box of Brian Eno's Oblique Strategies problem-solving cards (the festival's name, he says, was inspired by the top card, "Abandon normal techniques"). He is also the director of the Cornerhouse, the multipurpose arts centre on Manchester's Oxford Road that acts as AND headquarters. The new film festivals are economic meeting points, he says, a cross-pollination zone of film-makers, editors, writers and performers. Cultural industries are one of the few strengths of the UK economy, he points out. AND is at the heart of Manchester's efforts to rebuild as a knowledge economy, just as Flatpack in Birmingham is part of a concerted effort to rejuvenate the Digbeth warehouse district as a home for cultural industries.

Next up is probably the most established of the "interactive" film events, if you want to call them that. Onedotzero's annual Adventures in Motion festival features short films, interactive film-based installations, audiovisual performances, "crowd-sourced" documentaries, movies shot on mobile phones, and a programme called Robotica, an exploration of "the wonder and social effects of robots or androids, which also includes a robot-building workshop in the form of Moanbot", whatever that may be.

For now, these festivals still occupy the edges of the film world. But the trend towards interactivity in film is becoming widespread. Multiplexes show sports events, while whisky brands sponsor Secret Cinema-style "film events". Backstage at a screening he was presenting of Taxi Driver in a car park in London's Soho, actor Riz Ahmed, star of Four Lions, tells me: "It's about adding value to that live experience in the context of piracy - where recorded content is always free." He gestured to the women surrounding us, actors hired by sponsor Jameson to portray lowlife wastrels in an effort to evoke New York City in the 1970s. "That same desire drives 3D, too, but this is more imaginative, really – would you rather have pimps and prostitutes or 3D Smurfs?"

Onedotzero's Adventures in Motion festival runs from 10 to 14 November at the BFI Southbank and BFI Imax. Details: onedotzero.com